Do you have an old router and planning to throw it away? Well! It is not a good idea. You can use it for various purposes. Here are some of the best ways to recycle an old Wi-Fi router. You may or may not know about them all. However, you can use these tips without any problem.

1. Use With VPN Connection

There are many times we need to enable VPN to do something. For instance, you want to unlock some regionally blocked content and so on. Also, there are many times when you might need to enable VPN on your router so that all the connected devices can use that without installing a third-party VPN app on each device. If you want that as well as you want to use another router for general use like online streaming and so on, you can use your old router. You can set up a VPN in the old router and keep using that for a longer time. Whenever you need to use a connection for online streaming and all, you can use your regular router.

2. Set up Router for Guests

Let’s assume that guests often come to your house and you need to give them your Wi-Fi connection (obviously). Also suppose, you do not want to allow your friends to use your personal Wi-Fi connection due to speed or bandwidth issue. At such moments, you can easily set up a secondary Wi-Fi router and give that to your friends or relatives who often come to your house. That way you can keep using your personal Wi-Fi router for your work purpose without having any problem so far.

3. Wireless Bridge

Wireless Bridge helps you create internetwork connections. In other words, if you have two different connections and you want to use that as one for any reason, you can combine them (virtually) and use them as a single network. There are three types of Wireless Bridge, and those are Wi-Fi to Ethernet Bridge, Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi Bridge, and Bluetooth to Wi-Fi bridge. If you have a very old router, you might not get such options. However, if you have a four or five years old router, you will certainly be able to use it as a wireless bridge. One thing you should remember that it requires network protocol support.

4. Network Switch

In simple words, a network switch helps you connect more devices to your Wi-Fi router using Ethernet cable. Generally, Wi-Fi routers have either four or six Ethernet ports. That means you can use only four or six computers or other devices using an Ethernet cable. However, if you want to use more devices, you can use your old router as a network switch. Various ISPs use network switch to divide the connection across multiple users. You can use the same technique to extend the number of devices you can connect to your router. One thing is important, and that is you must have DD-WRT support. Otherwise, you cannot do it with your router. After attaching more devices you may face speed issue due to overloading.

5. Wi-Fi Repeater

A WiFi repeater costs from $30-$100 (generally). However, if you have an old router and you are thinking to throw it away, you might need to think about it twice since you can use your old router as a Wi-Fi Repeater. Let’s assume that you have a two-floor home and your Wi-Fi connection is not reaching to every corner of your home. At such moments, you can use a Wi-Fi repeater that will extend the existing connection and allow you to use your Wi-Fi connection from every corner of your house. A Wi-Fi repeater can be set up at the edge of an existing router’s range, and after that range, you will get a connection from the second router or the repeater.

6. Smart Home Hub

This is probably the best thing you can do if your home has some smart devices for doing different things like security and all. You can use your old router as a  home automation server, and for that, your router should have a serial port. After the proper setup, your router will work as a server, and you can connect your smart gadgets to those servers to do various things. The best thing is you can control everything of that server right from your browser.

These are some of the best ways to recycle or reuse an old router. Apart from that, you can also open up the router case and examine different things, if you have a knack for such fields.